Charles Stransky has narrated 7 audiobooks on Listento.it by 8 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 15 ratings. The most-rated is The Sword and the Shield.
The Sword and the Shield
Summary
In 1992 Vasili Mitrokhin defected to England and brought along an extensive archive of military intelligence from the Soviet Union. A career KGB officer who served as chief archivist for its foreign operations, Vasili Mitrokhin became disillusioned with the Soviet system and its constant repression of dissidents at home and abroad. Determined to preserve the truth, he secretly compiled a detailed record of the agency's worldwide espionage network. The Sword and the Shield offers an unprecedented look into the KGB's top-secret activities. It is described by the FBI as "the most complete and extensive intelligence ever achieved from any source." Supplementing this trove of KGB secrets with extensive research in other archives, published and unpublished, Christopher Andrew has written an extraordinary book which forces you to acknowledge that there was indeed an enemy - and that he was very much in our midst.Revelations from The Sword and the Shield: The massive role that the KGB played in the Cold War and the state-sanctioned paranoia behind it The KGB's attempts to discredit J. Edgar Hoover, and their eavesdropping activities against Henry Kissinger Details of secret radio and arms caches buried throughout Western Europe and the United States The real identities of the KGB's most senior spies in Britain and the United States The internal repression of dissidents within the Soviet Union, including the KGB's own most capable and best educated officers
©1999 Christopher Andrew (P)16 9; 2000 HighBridge Company
The Second Coming of Steve Jobs
Summary
From the acclaimed Vanity Fair and GQ journalist - an unprecedented, in-depth portrait of the man whose return to Apple precipitated one of the biggest turnarounds in business history. When Steve Jobs became the acting CEO of Apple Computers, it was hemorrhaging more than a billion dollars a year. His return after twelve years of exile to the company he co-founded completely revitalized Apple. With the revolutionary success of the iMac, Apple turned a profit of over $600 million last year. Based on interviews with scores of people - rivals, colleagues, friends - who have worked with Jobs over the years, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs presents the most revealing portrait yet of this extraordinarily complex man; how and why he almost gave up his career; the details of his negotiations with Disney's Jeffrey Kaztenberg and Michael Eisner and of the culture clash between Silicon Valley and Hollywood; his methods of leadership, management, creativity, and innovation; his friendship and rivalry with Bill Gates - and much more. Since the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs has captivated the public. Now, as Jobs prepares to conquer Hollywood with his enormously successful animation film studio, Pixar, Alan Deutschman brings listeners what will be one of the most talked-about business audios of the year. Alan Deutschman is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. For the past twelve years, he has covered business and technology. He was a correspondent for Fortune for seven years, a senior writer at GQ, and a contributing editor at New York magazine.
©2000 by Alan Deutschman (P)2000 Random House, Inc.
Red Moon Rising
Summary
On October 4, 1957, a time of Cold War paranoia, the Soviet Union secretly launched the Earth's first artificial moon. No bigger than a basketball, the tiny satellite was powered by a car battery. Yet, for all its simplicity, Sputnik stunned the world. Based on extensive research in the US and newly opened archives in the former USSR, Red Moon Rising tells the story of five extraordinary months in the history of technology and the rivalry between two superpowers. It takes us inside the Kremlin and introduces the Soviet engineer Korolev, the charismatic, politically-minded visionary who motivated Khruschev to support what others dismissed as a ridiculous program. Korolev is virtually unknown to most Americans, yet it is because of him that NASA exists, that college loan programs were started in the U.S., and that Kennedy and Johnson became presidents. Character driven, suspenseful, and dramatic, Red Moon Rising unveils the politics, people, science, and mindset behind a critical and transformative world event.
©2007 Matthew Brzezinski (P)2007 HighBridge Company
Poison Blonde
Summary
Who is Gilia Cristobal? On first appearance, Gilia Cristobal seems to be exactly what she claims: a bright, talented, blonde-bombshell Latina singer who has worked hard to rise to the pinnacle of popular acclaim while maintaining her artistic integrity and ideals. Amos Walker ought to know better. There's nobody that perfect and Gilia is just too good to be true. For starters, she's not really Gilia, and that's just the tip of a deadly iceberg of lies that threatens to sink him. Having fled her native land in the wake of accusations of murder and blackmail, "Gilia" hires Walker for protection. It's when she asks him for a favor - to find the missing woman whose identity she's been using to stay in the United States - that the Latin heat really begins to rise. What started out as a routine payday turns downright deadly, as Walker finds himself up to his neck in international drug smuggling, double identities, music-industry gangsters, and a clients who's nothing but trouble. One man has already endured torture to keep the secrets of Gilia Cristobal. Is Amos Walker that brave...or that foolish?
©2003 Loren D. Estleman (P)2003 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrink Publishers, LLC.
Hitler's Holy Relics
Summary
A True Story of Nazi Plunder and the Race to Recover the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire Had Hitler succeeded in conquering Europe, he would have crowned himself Holy Roman Emperor. The Nazis had in their possession priceless artifacts that would give Hitler legitimacy in his subjects' eyes: the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, including the Spear of Destiny, alleged to have pierced Christ's side at the Crucifixion. Looted from the royal treasury in Vienna, Austria, the Crown Jewels were hidden in a secret bunker deep beneath Nrnberg castle, known to few but Heinrich Himmler, his staff, and a captured German soldier whose family lived above it. As luck would have it, the officer in charge of interrogating the soldier was First Lieutenant Walter Horn, art history professor. Following his report to General Patton, Horn would be assigned to recover this ancient treasure. Would he find it before covert Nazi agents could use it to revive the defeated regime? >Based on recently discovered and previously unpublished documents and interviews with all remaining living participants, this is a tale that surpasses fiction: part thriller, part detective story, all true.
©2010 Sidney Kirkpatrick (P)2010 HighBridge Company
A Ranger Born
Summary
Even as a boy growing up amid the green hills of rural Pennsylvania, Robert W. Black knew he was destined to become a Ranger. With their 300-year history of peerless courage and independence of spirit, Rangers are a uniquely American brand of soldier, one foot in the military, one in the wilderness - and that is what fired Black’s imagination. In this searing, inspiring memoir, Black recounts how he devoted himself, body and soul, to his proud service as an elite US Army Ranger in Korea and Vietnam - and what those years have taught him about himself, his country, and our future. Born at the start of the Great Depression, Black grew up on a farm at a time of great hardship but also tremendous national determination. He was a kid who toughened up fast, who learned the hard way to rely on his strength and his wits, who saw the country go to war with Germany and Japan and wept because he was too young to serve. As soon as the army would take him, Black enlisted. And as soon as he could muscle his way in, he became a Ranger. As a private first class in the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters, Black withstood the humiliations of enlisted service in the peacetime brown-shoe army. When the Korean War began, he volunteered and trained to be an Airborne Ranger. In Korea, this young warrior, his mind and body bursting with the lusts of adolescence, grew up fast, literally in the line of fire. In clean, vivid prose, Black describes the hell of giving his all for a country that lacked the political resolve to give its all to a war against the North Koreans and the Chinese. If Korea was frustrating, Vietnam was maddening. The heart of this audiobook is devoted to the years of action that Black saw in Long An Province starting in 1967. Black writes of the perplexity of collaborating with South Vietnamese officers whose culture and motives he never fully understood; he conjures up the sudden shock of the Tet Offensive and the daily horror of seeing fellow soldiers and innocent civilians slaughtered - sometimes by stray bullets, often by carelessness or treachery. Vietnam challenged everything Black had come to believe in and left him totally unprepared for the hostility he would face when he returned to a war-weary America. Written with extraordinary candor and passion, A Ranger Born is the memoir of a man who dedicated the best of his life to everything that is great and enduring about America. At once intimate in its revelations and universal in its themes, it is an audiobook with profound relevance to our own troubled time in history.
©2007 Robert W. Black (P)2018 Random House Audio
Fiddlers
Summary
Ed McBain's latest installment in the 87th Precinct series finds the detectives stumped by a serial killer who doesn't fit the profile. A blind violinist taking a smoke break, a cosmetics sales rep cooking an omelet in her own kitchen, a college professor trudging home from class, a priest contemplating retirement in the rectory garden, an old woman out walking her dog, these are the seemingly random targets shot twice in the face. But most serial killers don't use guns. Most serial killers don't strike five times in two weeks. And most serial killers' prey share something more than being over fifty years of age. Now it falls to Detective Steve Carella and his colleagues in the 87th Precinct to find out what, or whom, the victims had in common before another body is found. With trademark wit and sizzling dialogue, McBain unravels a mystery and examines the dreams we chase in the darkening hours before the fiddlers have fled.
©2005 Hui Corp. (P)2005 HighBridge Company